Now here is a nice Christmas surprise. Modders ‘Remiros’ and ‘Greatness7’ have released an optimization mod for Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. According to the modders, this mod significantly improves performance in outdoor environments and packs improved shading effects for trees and flora.
Going into slightly more details, this mod disables Alpha Blending in favor of Alpha Testing, and strips down NiTriShapes to a bare minimum in order to increase performance.
In addition, this unofficial Morrowind Optimization Patch fixes many shading errors in the original trees, adds new and more accurate collision meshes for most trees, and adds custom vertex normals to most trees and flora that improve their visuals without any performance impact.
Those interested can download the Morrowind Optimization Patch from here. In order to install it, you’ll just have to drop the contents into your data files folder. Also note that this will overwrite meshes you already have installed.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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A nice little hold over until OpenMW gets its 1.0 release.
It boggles my mind that people are devoting time to optimizing the performance of a 15 year old game that probably runs at 500 FPS on a PC you can buy for $200.
maybe performance flaws in the base game become a problem when running the game with newer graphics mods? I wondered the same thing though.
In that case wouldn’t it be advertised as a compatibility fix, and not a performance enhancement?
well, it IS a performance enhancement.
Precisely.
it can be heavily modded to look like a nearly completely modern game, the FPS hit comes from doing this on a 20 year-old game engine
Gotta love the modding community.
I wonder if this is compatible with all versions of the game. I just got the GOTY version off Steam a couple weeks ago for like $8.
Fixing Bethesda’s faulty work again.
Guys,Make your own games and we will buy them.
We just heard Bethesda saying they need to raise game prices if micro transactions are dumped, All to pay for rising game development costs. lol
this game came out in 2002, the need for mods and optimization aren’t a design flaw
Gotta love the modding community.
Until they charge for their work. Most of the people praising the mod community have never donated a dime to a mod author.
A nice little hold over until OpenMW gets its 1.0 release.